Wednesday, December 31, 2008

EEStor Trademarks Reveal EESU Specs?

In December of 2007, EEStor Inc., working with the Austin, TX based law firm of Larson, Newman, Abel, Polansky & White, applied for trademark protection of "EEStor" and "EESU." The trademarks were approved in September of 2008. Among the trademark "specimens" offered in the application is a document referred to as "Preliminary Ceramic Battery Specifications" which appears to contain the first known EEStor released energy packaging information.

The unit offers .65kWh working at 24 volts, 20amps continuous with a charge time of 90 seconds. The package is 101mm^3 or about the size of a 1 liter bottle of water or 2 DVD cases put together. If you're trying to imagine if this is something that could fit into a wearable power vest, it could...easily. According to Bret Decelle, historian of EEStor Inc., this new finding represents the first known packaging information for an EESU providing " a usable amount of energy in a usable package." To gain an understanding of the capabilities, imagine that you have what amounts to an iGo-like external battery source connected to your laptop. On a contemporary Dell D830 laptop (or any regular laptop) whose battery life is currently around 4hrs, an EESU as described in the trademark document would give you 35 hrs of run time. Or roughly speaking 7 cross country flights without recharging. An iGo device that had various output cabling converters could keep you mobile for days under normal use. All of this would be with a 90 second charge time using a specialized charger.

Another way to think about this is that in the footprint of a slightly larger than a DVD case, you would have the energy equivalent of a modern car battery or something that weighs 60lbs reduced down to 5lbs...certainly a key advantage for anyone not to mention a warfighter.

Following Lockheed Martin's recent receipt of a patent application for a body armor garment with energy storage capabilities, the use of the phrase EESU or Electrical Energy Storage Unit has been debated as to origin and status in ordinary language. The current trademark protection ends at least part of this debate.

Many interesting questions are raised by this new revelation first among them is certainly the following: is this a specification for a Lockheed wearable power unit, a LightEVs ebike or a set of units (just under 100) which are assembled together into the 52kWh EESU destined for Zenn Motor Company?


See TheEEStory.com for further discussion. A Forum Topic was created to discuss this new information.

Special Thanks to Bret "BretSpot" DeCelle for help with this article. His EEStor timeline can be found here:

1 comment:

DGDanforth said...

In your Dec 31 Blog you state

"The package is 101mm^3 or about the size of a 1 liter bottle of water or 2 DVD cases put together."

If mm = milimeters then I disagree with you on your size estimate. The cube root of 101 is between 4 (4^3=64) and 5 (5^3=125). Let's call it 5 for easy computation. That means that the unit discussed is 5 mm on a side or about 1/2 a centimeter. This means there are 8 of these units in a cubic centimeter. There a 1,000 cubic centimeters in a liter so your estimate is 8,000 times too big!

The size of the unit is more like that of a sugar cube. Again assuming by 'mm' you meant milimeter (1/1000 of a meter). The unit is tiny!